Land Board Told Logging Helps Salmon

Bryan Ravenscroft, son of Vern, gave an unusual presentation to the state Land Board this week.

As the state’s top elected officials listened politely, the younger Ravenscroft gave a long report suggesting that poisons leaching out of tree roots are the real culprit in the decline of the salmon, and the solution is more logging.

The chemicals given off by the trees create a “very toxic tea,” Ravenscroft said. When fish drink that tea, “At the lowest levels, it makes the fish anorexic, they stop eating,” he said. At higher levels, he said, “they start hemorrhaging.”

Ravenscroft said he’s been to the EPA and the DEQ about his research.

“They simply had never heard of this problem,” he said.

Neither had Dave Cannamela, a fisheries staff biologist for Idaho Fish and Game, who said Idaho’s wild chinook salmon and steelhead runs were abundant up to the early 1960s, when the four lower Snake River dams were completed.

Up to 120,000 of the wild fish returned to Idaho each year until the dams choked off their migration.

Now, the chinook are endangered and the steelhead appear to be headed that way too.

Cannamela said, “I guess I just don’t know how that hypothesis would fit … why all of a sudden trees become toxic to salmon when these fish evolved in a wide variety of habitats, many of which had trees of all different varieties and sizes.”

The biologist also said he’d never heard of anorexia in wild fish.

Bryan Ravenscroft, who runs his father’s treated-wood post company in Tuttle, Idaho, said he’s had some training in “wood chemistry,” but was addressing the Land Board as a private citizen.

State Superintendent of Schools Anne Fox responded, “This seems very significant. … Do we have any research money?”

The board agreed to refer the report to state scientists.

Secretary of State Pete Cenarrusa said he put the report on the Land Board’s agenda because Vern Ravenscroft asked him to.

“It was on the strength of Vern Ravenscroft, a friend of mine and also a legislator that I legislated with,” Cenarrusa said. “I’ve known him for a long, long time.”

Vern Ravenscroft is the former business partner with whom U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth admitted this week she had a six-year affair in the 1980s, while he was married. The disclosure came as Chenoweth attacked President Clinton in television ads, arguing that “political leaders’ personal conduct must be held to the highest standards.”

Talk of the town

Boise was buzzing over the Chenoweth story this week - so much so that KIDO radio devoted its PM Idaho call-in program to the story.

Among those who called in: Chenoweth herself. Host Jon Duane asked her, “Any other skeletons in the closet?”

Her answer: “I’m just not gonna go there.”

All wrapped up?

It’s always dangerous to assume you’ve won an election months before it happens.

But that appears to be what Ron Crane has done. After all, no Democrat is running against him for state treasurer. He faces only a third-party candidate, investment banker Latham Williams of the Reform Party.

But that doesn’t explain why Crane, an eight-term Republican state legislator from Caldwell, is the only major-party candidate who hasn’t bothered to respond to the invitation to debate his opponent on Idaho Public Television in October.

A debate would be a lot of free exposure. Plus, it would be a chance for citizens to get to know the man who wants to take charge of the state’s treasury.

Crane also hasn’t returned a reporter’s calls for the past week.

Right in Crane’s hometown, some years back, an incumbent mayor was so confident he had the election sewn up that he went on an extended vacation. When he returned, he’d been beaten by a write-in.